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Multiple redirects is a really bad idea and should be corrected whenever possible. The consideration I ask clients to understand is how multiple redirects amplify the loss of link juice. The numbers I will use in the below example are simply how I explain it when asked, and I don't have any solid math to back it up. As we all know, the exact process is kept secret.

Redirect #1 = lose 10% link juice

Redirect #2 = 1st link loses 10%, 2nd link loses 10%x2=20%, total 30% loss

Redirect #3 = 1st link loses 10%, 2nd link loses 20%, 3rd link loses 30% = 60% loss

Redirect #4 = 100% loss.

Again the numbers are likely not that dramatic, but it helps get site owners out of the mindset of "well, a 301 loses just a drop of link juice so 3 or 4 redirects doesn't lose much". We know the trust factors for a site rapidly diminish in an amplified manner a few links away from the source. We know PR on a site evaporates almost completely 4 links into a site. Even top PR sites like DMOZ and Yahoo directory have pages not indexed because there is not enough PR passed through their links to pages on their site which are deep. It is logical to think this same concept applies to redirects. It is another form of following links.

As with most hosting providers, there are positive and negative points about GoDaddy.

Positives: 24/7 live customer service

Negatives:

• if you just want to buy a domain or hosting service, GoDaddy makes it hard. They offer dozens of other products and services which confuse many visitors

• they spam you with sales messages all the time

• instead of using the industry standard cPanel to manage your website, they have a custom tool which is not as good as cPanel. If you use cPanel and change hosts, your new host will likely offer cPanel so you will not have to learn a new tool. With GoDaddy, it's a pain.

• I have called their customer service, their rep confirmed the shared server being used was performing below average but they said they could not change to a faster server unless the server actually went down. I escalated the issue to a supervisor who then confirmed the issue.

Personally I like Surpass Hosting which is another brand for HostDime. Everyone seems to have their own favorite. There is no consensus.

If you are hosting a business site, I would make sure you obtain at least VPS hosting and not shared hosting.

GoDaddy's Certified Domain option is a $5 trust badge. A trust badge is valued based on two primary factors: recognition and standards. There are no standards for this badge, anyone can get it. While many people have heard of GoDaddy, I would suggest 99% of people have no awareness of what a "certified domain" is with respect to what GoDaddy offers and the badge has no recognition value.

In short, it's crap. http://www.godaddy.com/domains/certified-domains.aspx

You pay $5 and they verify your WhoIs information. That's it.

Most quality sites which involve ecommerce offer SSL certificates such as VeriSign or McAfee. These certificates are far more recognizable and offer much higher levels of tangible "certification". I wouldn't accept GoDaddy's certification symbol for free. That's just my opinion and others may share a different view.

I have used GoDaddy before but have since switched to NameCheap. GoDaddy's customer service is ok, but they are highly sales oriented with offers (i.e. sending spam e-mails and making their site difficult to use without being overwhelmed by offers) to customers asking them to buy a wide array of completely unnecessary products and services such as this domain certification.

Our main competitor in the UK seems to be ranking extremely good for the keyword "jigsaw puzzles" even though their linking profile doesn't seem all that great?

Before even thinking about a linking profile, take a look at the site and onpage factors.

1. The domain name is jigsawpuzzlesdirect.co.uk, a partial match domain name with the first two terms in the domain name.

2. Their page title is "Jigsaw Puzzles Direct - A huge range of jigsaws, jigsaw puzzles, mind puzzles and accessories for all ages that you can buy online." It's not a great title, but it begins with a match to the phrase and contains another match to the phrase.

3. The H1 tag on the page is Jigsaw Puzzles

4. The very first words of content match the search term: "Jigsaw Puzzles Direct have made buying a jigsaw puzzle online easier than doing one! "

There are certainly opportunities for them to improve SEO but the above factors are very strong. How does your site compare on these factors? I would not even think about links until you addressed the main factors above.

Would implementing code to prohibit (or at least make it difficult) to save images and copy content, penalize us?

It is not possible to prevent content theft. Anyone who can read your content can copy it. The same applies to images. It is a mistake to try. At best, you will prevent a relatively small percentage of people with little understanding from being able to copy your content, and that is not the group people normally wish to impede.

Let's say you did create a new technology which actually prevented most forms of copying content. If a person sees your webpage they can take an image of the page at the push of a single button, then paste that image into photo shop. From there they can cut out your images and save them. They could also use a OCR to capture all the text. This can be done in 60 seconds.

There is a large interest in achieving the goal you seek and I am not aware of any organization that has come close on any level to achieving it. If somehow it was achieved, the page would not be readable by search engines. Search engines have to be able to read every character of text through their web crawlers. In effect, search engines scrape your content. If you find a technology to prevent copying text, it would prevent search engines from crawling as well.

The best your boss can do is copyright the website and/or images. It is highly likely your bosses fears will be realized at some point and his content or images will be stolen if it is of a high quality nature. A copyright will provide him with the maximum amount of legal protection. You can also employ the services of companies which will embed a tracking code of sorts into images. These companies then crawl the web each month looking for your protected content on other sites.

You can achieve what you are asking, but I would not advise doing such.

SEO is about one factor, competition. Period.

If you decided to rank for a unique term such as "fluffy SEO eating bunnies" and no one else is attempting to rank for that term, you can easily rank #1 for it. On the other hand, if 10 other sites try to rank for the same term, then it is a pure competition and one site will win the battle.

It is hard enough to earn rankings. Trying to rank with a penalized site, or for the more sensitive readers "algorithmically disadvantaged", is not wise. You need to resolve the root issue.

To put it in financial terms, add up the sales you have lost over the past months due to lower rankings. Now examine the cost of removing the penalty. Even most small businesses will find it cheaper to have the penalty or Penguin issue dealt with properly then trying to rank with a penalized site.

Also consider Penguin is undergoing a major update. Matt Cutts shared the effects of the next Penguin update will be "jarring and jolting". There are only two ways I can interpret that statement. Either many sites which have not been impacted by Penguin in the past will be affected, sites which have been impacted will be hit a lot harder, or both. My bet is on both.

Having a penalty or Penguin issue on your site is like having your house on fire. You are standing there with a hose trying to put out the fire. It's time to call 911 and have the fire put out, then work on repairing the damage.

I applaud do-it-yourself SEO for small, highly involved business owners under normal circumstances. Manual penalties and algorithmic issues such as Penguin require expertise to deal with, otherwise you will submit 10 Reconsideration Requests and have all 10 declined. Clearly, you are not properly addressing the root issue.

what do I need to do to get out of this "SERP lock"?

Without looking at the site and the keywords involved, we can only offer generic advice.

I would suggest examining all aspects of your onpage factors. Some specifics are:

• page title: focus a single keyword

• header: focus the same keyword

• content: the first sentence of your content should also focus the same keyword

• site internal linking: when appropriate, other pages of your site should provide links in content to other relevant pages.

• url: clean, friendly, static urls which offer appropriate use of keywords is helpful

Wikipedia is a great example for many of the above steps.

There are other items to check. My point is link building and site promotion is an ongoing process which happens over months and years. On page changes have the ability to instantly and dramatically change your ranking. There is a good chance you are stuck due to onpage factors.

Moving a server outside of the country of your target audience can impact ranking. A server located in UK is an indicator the site is more likely to be relevant to the UK.

With the above noted, there are numerous other methods you can use to show relevancy such as setting the site's geo-target in Google WMT, using the meta language tag such as "EN-UK" and showing a physical address within the UK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXt23AXlJJU

The first part of the battle is knowing your links. Each source of backlink information, including Google, has advantages and disadvantages. I have been resolving manipulative link issues for clients since 2011 (i.e. before Penguin) and what has worked in 100% of cases is a backlink report comprised of data from the following 5 sources: Google, Bing, AHREFs, Majestic and OSE. This combination of backlink data has always worked. That is not to say there are not other sources of backlinks which can be used.

Once you have a comprehensive list of all linking domains, the next step is to visit each site and determine if the links are manipulative or organic. Covering that topic fully would be a very lengthy article but in brief:

1. Closely examine Google's Quality Guidelines.

2. Remove any links you, or anyone else acting on the site's behalf (i.e. "SEO", link builder, developer, etc) built.

3. Remove links you created to the site from other sites you own

4. For each link ask "How did this link get here?" If the answer is the site owner independently created the link for their own reasons, that is great. This type of link is a naturally EARNED organic link. If there was any undue influence from the site owner which caused the link to be created, it is likely a manipulative link.

5. Take a look at the other links from that site. If the site offers links to other spammy sites, that is a very bad sign. Would you be ashamed for your customers to see this link?

6. Where is the link? Is it in content (which is strongly preferred) or is it in a sidebar or footer where spammy links are more likely to be found.

There is no hard and fast rules. There are guidelines. Ultimately you look at links and determine if they possess the qualities of an organic or manipulative link.

With respect to automated link identification services, there are two problems. First, they will typically identify some organic links as manipulative. Secondly, they will identify some manipulative links as organic. Both issues are highly problematic. You get what you pay for.

Good Luck.

I used to use Xenu until shortly after Dr Pete shared this blog (http://moz.com/blog/crawler-faceoff-xenu-vs-screaming-frog) which introduced me to Screaming Frog. Both will work, but you will find XENU is more like using DOS whereas Screaming Frog has a very nice interface.

For internal 301s, you can clearly crawl the site and export a list of all 301 redirects to the target page.

For external URLs, there is not a simple method. I suggest two tactics:

1. Examine your analytics for referring URLs

2. Examine your backlink reports for links to the page

You can then crawl the list of URLs and determine which pages are being redirected. With the above understood, the primary concern should be your internal URLs.

I enjoy Linkscape. It is a great tool which can help us better understand our client's sites along with their competitors.

I am also disappointed with the shortcomings of the tool. I would love faster updates along with more complete coverage. Do you realize that it only covers the top 25% of pages from the web? You miss out on a lot of links.

With the above understood, you are making a mistake if you are presenting this report to clients with any level of significance. Your mistake is compounded by your dependency on the timeline.

This is not the first time the update was late nor will it be the last. The tool is not complete! There are significant upgrades that need to be made, and those updates require changes and significant risk. This is not some simple program running on 1 pc where you can use another pc for easy testing. The software takes 3-4 weeks to crawl the web, then another 1-2 weeks to process the data.

We are here at SEOmoz because their tools, as imperfect as they may be, are still great. As long as the tools remain superior to others, you and I will stay. That's reality. Adjust your client's expectations of the report and timeline.

This question has already been asked and answered in the Q&A by SEOmoz staff. It's the standard "we apologize for the delay and are doing our best" type of customer service message you would expect. http://www.seomoz.org/q/linkscape-update-again-not-happeening

Link directories are a poor method of link building. Ask yourself, as a user, do you like link directories? Do you use any of the ones on the list? Do you know anyone who does? If the answer to all these questions is "no", then why would you want to spend time and money to be added to one of these directories?

Take all the time and effort and write the best article ever on a single topic. I notice your user name is techbattery so I will use a battery example. Write an article on cell phone or ipad batteries. Make the article relevant to anyone who owns one of those devices. "Best Ipad Battery for you" could be the title. Talk about different battery types, charge life, shelf life, can you overcharge them, why do they get so warm/hot, etc. Make it an article that everyone who owns an iPad will want to read. Let the world know about the article.

Ideally everyone who sells or owns an iPad will WANT to link to your article. The value you will get from that article will exceed anything you get from your link directory efforts.

The best location to host videos would depend upon the content of the videos and your overall goals.

YouTube hosting offers:

• #3 ranked website in the world. Huge user base

• Google owns YouTube. When I post a video on youtube I consistently see it listed in Google within 2 hours.

• YouTube offers the videos in many formats. If you upload in 1080HD, it will be offered in 240, 360, 480, 720HD, 1080HD so users can choose the version they prefer based on their connection quality. Also YouTube uses a Content Delivery Network which significantly improves playback speeds by offering local servers for users.

• YouTube comments and thumbs up/down is very popular means of engaging users and generating content.

• your videos may contain unwanted ads or links to other videos from competitors if not set up correctly.

Vimeo and other video hosts:

• not as popular as YouTube, but each has a dedicated user base and is most likely more popular then your site. Sharing an occasional video on these sites will add exposure for your videos.

• the other points mentioned for YouTube apply to the many other providers, but to a lesser degree

Local hosting

• while you could offer the video in many versions and offer a CDN, most websites used by small companies do not so you miss out on those advantages. If videos do not play back smoothly, the user experience is significantly lowered.

• video content takes a large amount of disk space and bandwidth which can be a cost issue for small sites

Most often small sites can host the video on YouTube or Vimeo then display the video on an embedded player from their website.

If you offer a quality article to other quality sites who properly tag the article, it can be quite beneficial to your site. There's a few carefully chosen words in that statement so I'll offer some clarification.

Quality article: If you offer some helpful, informative "best on the web" type of content then share the article on other sites, you are exposing yourself and your site to an audience that may otherwise have never known about your site. I would make sure you already have solid content on similar topics so when your article attracts traffic, you can keep them interested in your site. If you write an article on the health benefits of Vitamin A, then a "related articles" area that talks about other vitamins or health issues which vitamin A addresses would be great.

Quality sites: If you share your article with sites that already have established audiences, then your article will be exposed to new viewers. Anything from social media sites like Reddit, to topic sites like Glamour magazine, or PC Magazine can be helpful. What you want to be careful about is sharing the article with sites that do not have established articles. In that case the benefit is minimal and the published article on the other site can wind up competing with yours in SERPs for traffic.

Proper tagging: The article should either use a canonical tag to identify your site as the source, or the new meta tagging such as rel=author. It should be clear that your site is the original source of the article.

There are a few ways to do it and it depends on your server setup. Since you are showing a .php example I'll take a guess that you are using an Apache server. If that is the case the easiest method is to modify your .htaccess file.

CAUTION: any mistake in your .htaccess file can cause your site to become instantly unavailable or have other negative effects. Always make a backup first. If you are not very confident in your abilities to make the change and you are on managed hosting, ask your host to make the change.

The below code will remove the php extension from file names:

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.php [NC,L]

You can change the last line from php to html to have the effect for html extensions. Example:

RewriteRule ^([^\.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L]

I personnaly think that there should be a big mistake on our site that penalize us and our SEO but I can't find what it is...

You are correct. Your site is duplicated. It appears as both www.proximeety.com and proximeety.com. Both versions of your site have links as well, so your link juice is divided between your two sites. You need to decide which version of your site you prefer, the www or non-www version, and then redirect traffic to ensure only one version of your site is in use.

Also, your home page has 15 internal links and 82 external links. That profile is backwards. Most of your links should be internal with a few external links added as appropriate.

In short, your home page needs major SEO attention. I would advise hiring a SEO professional as it seems to need a complete overhaul. If you wish to perform the work yourself, the Beginner's Guide to SEO is a great place to start.

I'm afraid there is no answer to that question. Here is why.

Each blog article you offer will cover a specific topic. More specifically, the article will focus one or more keyword phrases. The question search engines will decide is which web page is most likely to satisfy a user's query for that phrase.

If your article topic is "Houseism defined" then 100 words is probably enough. You could expand the article to 1000+ words by offering examples, explaining the history of the term, share instances where a House-ism was used in media outside of the television show House, etc.

The more content you share, the more thorough your topic coverage is of the keyword BUT the more opportunities arise to go off topic or dilute your message.

How many words should be in a blog post for it to be optimal for the search engines?

Enough to fully cover the specific keyword phrase target of the page. Always examine the top 5 SERPs for the target phrase. Search results are a competition. Some low quality articles rank as #1 and other high quality articles can't break the top 3 due entirely to competition.

This guy said that he has totally emphasized having great content and not SEO tactics or marketing tactics.

For the most part, great content is the cornerstone of solid white hat SEO and marketing.

Work such as optimizing meta tags, robots.txt files and similar search engine specific activities are an extremely small percentage of a SEO's time. A much better use of time is spent on content related activities. A few examples:

• determine which topics are most popular. You can write a fantastic legal article on the insanity defense, but how many people are interested in that topic? You may find a "how to beat a speeding ticket" article will be a LOT more popular.

• ensure the topics are relevant to your services. Perhaps you are a one attorney office and you specialize in the insanity defense. In that case, even if your main topic is unpopular, you can only handle one client at a time so the insanity article would be the best topic.

• the basic English and marketing strategies you have learned in school are all relevant to great content. Grabbing the reader's attention with a title such as "How I beat my last 7 speeding tickets" is often very successful. Writing articles in a wikipedia like fashion is not done for search engines, but for readers. See how they do it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speeding_ticket

• proper "link building" shouldn't be about grabbing links for search engine purposes, but instead earning links for direct traffic.

Try this approach. Pretend Google and search engines did not exist. Now write your articles and try to popularize them. What would you do differently? For my part, nothing would change with respect to the content itself.

Some suggestions: write the best article you can, let everyone know about it via social networking (twitter, facebook, etc), publicize the article anywhere you can think of where readers can find it. These tactics will be great for direct traffic, but they will also be great for search engines as well. Realistically speaking, if you provide great content and present it properly, you can promote your web pages "normally" without adjusting for search engines and the pages should do very well in search results.

PS. Please forgive my judgment, and I humbly admit I could be wrong, but I call bullsh*t on the guy who claims 200k visitors a day with 1.5% being from Google. It is entirely possible, but would be a very poor business strategy. The site is likely either in Russia or another country where Google is not a factor, or it is highly probable the statements are severely inaccurate or misleading.

I would recommend against using it for your company's main blog. Adding a quality blog to your main site is a very helpful way to improve your site. A blog should contain fresh content which is relevant both to your site and recent events. It is a way to bring in fresh traffic. Adding a blog to your main site will help increase the Domain Authority of your main site.

If you split your blog by adding it to another URL, a few challenges are created. First, you lose the advantages mentioned above. Secondly, you are linking from one site you control to another site you control which is not the type of link which Google values.

Otherwise simply redirecting your .net to your .com would be the current best practice.

It is a good idea to control the .net version of your site to better control your brand name. Depending on your hosting set up, you could use it to serve images or other content in parallel. I am not up on the latest site optimization techniques in that regard. Otherwise there is not much additional value owning the .net site offers.

Hi Bob.

When you receive a link, there are several ways to weigh it's value. Mainly there is the direct value of users who will see the link and click on it to drive traffic to your site. A second consideration is how the link will help you improve search engine rankings.

In this case, you already have a link from the site from their Resources page. More links from the same site wont improve your number of linking root domains, so it wont diversify your link profile in that regard. Footer links are often not seen and rarely actually used. My question to you is, how often do you think a user might see the link and click on it? I would even suggest you test the idea with your analytics.

How much will this move us up for the keyword "NLP"?

Search engine rankings can move for various reasons without your making any change. With that in mind, I don't believe receiving a footer link from this site will have any positive effect on your rankings. With that said, it can't hurt so you are welcome to obtain the link. I would rather suggest you obtain a link in one of the sidebars, or perhaps a content link in their blogs or elsewhere.